Final Reflections

It's the end of the semester again, and I've realized that I am the type of person who has an extremely short memory. At the end of the year, I suddenly feel a twinge of sadness leaving the classes that drove me crazy a few weeks ago, and a sense of fondness for the idiosyncrasies of an acquaintance who had annoyed me earlier. It is even more bittersweet packing to leave this week with the knowledge that I will not be returning to Richmond until next January because I will be studying in Senegal in the fall. While I am now certain that I want a break from the UR way of life and need to experience another world, it is a little saddening to think that I will not be joining my classmates in their first semester as writing consultants.

Amid the finals and projects of this last week, the end of the year is a time of reflection for me. For me, much of this semester was characterized by what I have learned in the process of training to become a consultant. Even before I have actually held my own consultations formally, I have realized that my ability to help my friends has increased exponentially. Before English 383, I was extremely cautious in giving my advice on their paper in the fear I would be wrong and hurt their paper. Now, I freely do so, but only with the caveat that it is just that, advice, not a command on what to do or what not to do. As David Fuller terms it, I have moved from a "teller" to a "shower" (Straub 224). And I really like this change. I actually enjoy showing people what their paper "says" to an outsider; I can help my writers to discover their paper's overall characteristics, its merits, its weaknesses. This is much more rewarding to me than telling them what to do, as if I was some all-knowing writing power, which I am clearly not and cannot be.

I've found that a successful consultation hinges on trust. The writer must trust the consultant, clearly, but the consultant must also trust the writer. Every writer that I have encountered in my consultations observed and held has something extremely valuable to offer to their paper that is not present yet; it just is sometimes hidden from view. Thus, I feel that Straub's comparison of a consultant as a "fellow explorer" (225) is a very apt one. While at some times I must guide my reader through the jungle thickets of essay-writing, at other times, they must lead me where they wish to go.

And here, although my mind is bursting with interwoven and often conflicting theories of writing center strategies and principles, I can rest. With a respect for the action and thoughts of the individual to lead me in my endeavors as a consultant, and, come to think of it, an American studying in Africa, I will be on the right path. I am extremely grateful for what I have learned during the semester, as I believe it has made me a better scholar in every aspect of my academic life. I look forward to my time next spring putting these theories into practice as a University of Richmond writing consultant.

Deciphering the Prompt

I consider myself a bit of a master at interpreting the often complex communication forms of the Liberal Arts professor. I am able to create meaning from the most circular exam question, find the central question in a sea of text, translate academic jargon into plain English. However, I must admit that this semester, I have found my skills on this front challenged by the phenomenon of the Monster Prompt.

This prompt is probably the most intimidating looking creation I have ever seen during my time at Richmond, and can be spotted by the presence of a few characteristics.
1) It is disproportionately long for the size of the assignment. Example: A 500-word for an assignment that is expected to be no more than 1000.
2) It poses at least five questions or ideas when clearly there is only enough room in the paper to elaborate on one.
3) It utilizes terms like "consider," "think about," "examine," "suggest."
4) It leaves the reader with a feeling of confusion, frustration, helplessness, or a combination of all three.

A recent prompt from a professor contained (note: this was just a section of the overall prompt) the following chain of commands. I've broken the prompt down down and left out the details to display them most effectively.
- "Consider what the author of your source puts forward, and also whether their evidence seems to fit into that model."
- "Your finished paper should have a clear thesis, providing the paper’s central argument. It should be organized to lead your reader effectively through your points."
- "It should go beyond simple summary to analyze and explore the evidence using specific examples (with page refs) and reaching conclusions about the implications of that evidence."
- "It should identify your chosen source as a particular genre, from a particular time."
- "And it should contextualize and assess it using at least two other readings/work."

Even though I have written for this professor a half a dozen times previously, I still was overwhelmed when first seeing this prompt. I think that my concern particularly stemmed from the structure, a block of text with one command after another. But counterintuitively, even with all of these tasks to complete within the paper, the assignment is still fairly ambiguous. I was not sure how to approach the topic, what elements I should focus on, and the extent to which I needed to focus on it. As a student studying writing theory, if I felt lost when reading the prompt, I cannot imagine how a first-year struggling writer would feel.

Kendall in "The Assignment Sheet Mystery," writes that an "assignment sheet is an important text within the university; the assignment sheet is a text written by instructors and affects the rhetorical situations within which students must compose" (2). I think this is an important mindset from which to approach the topic. By breaking down and analyzing the type of commands my professor included, the word choice, and even her tone, I was able to better gauge what kind of paper she was expecting. For example, in the prompt that I highlighted earlier, the professor gave active verb commands like "consider," "contextualize," "analyze," and "assess". While she did not give a lot of direction in the prompt, by asking the writer to complete these tasks through their writing, I could tell that the assignment was reflective in nature, and that she would value specific, critical observations over the proclamation of a universal truth. Similarly, the professor's tone in the prompt was almost conversational when discussing the subject at hand. By combining my previous experience with her and the provisions of the prompt, I could infer that the paper did not have rigid structural guidelines that I had to follow to do well.

I think it was this freedom contained, ironically, in the page-long prompt, that made it so difficult for me to begin the paper. As a consultant, I can help students "de-code," as Kendall says, the assignment sheet in front of them as I did myself. However, in these types of prompts, it is ultimately up to the student to make the final judgment call. In writing, there is always a risk. In papers such as these, where academic freedom is given to the student, the risk is much greater. It is our job as consultants to guide the students through what their possibilities are within the confines of the rhetorical structure of the prompt, but in the end, we can only hope that the risks they choose to take pay off.

Solitude in the Writing Process

I have been cursed with a propensity for laryngitis. When most people say that they lose their voice, they mean that when they speak, their words may be slightly raspy or they may sound a few octaves lower than usual. But when I lose my voice, I lose my ability to make a sound. It is a phenomenon I experience with irritating regularity and last weekend's particularly bad cold ensured that I was forced once again to live a game of charades for three days.

When you have experienced the problem of being unable to speak as often as I am, you realize the importance of human vocalization acutely. I consider myself a fairly quiet person, but after three hours of being unable to talk to anyone, I felt increasingly isolated and oddly useless. When I was alone with another person, they would lapse into silence, unable to continue a onesided conversation for more than a few minutes. I became more engrossed in written classwork than I normally would have; at least through writing I could express myself, and imagine that eventually my ideas would be "heard."

We often speak about writing as being an intimidating, and often lonely, process, a process where we are so engrossed in our own thoughts, our own ideas, that we isolate ourselves from others. This clearly can be true. A friend remarked to me recently that it made her more comfortable to work on a paper when there were others around her. Even though they had no idea what her paper was about or what she was thinking, their presence reminded her that there was a world going on outside of the ideas she struggled to engage with on her paper.

However, I believe that writing is an exercise in communication. This sounds like a statement so obvious that it is not worth typing. Yet, when I am writing something, whether it be this blog or an analysis on South African history, the sheer act of forming words, of forming sentences, of creating ideas, is a method of expressing my ideas. Even if there is no audience, by writing, I am clarifying my ideas. I have a feeling of building someone, to adding to some unknown collective pool of understanding.

I think the merging of these two concepts - of solidarity through sheer human presence and of silence for self-reflection - is why a writing center exists. Wingate says that a writing center is a place in which "tutors and writers grow accustomed to being treated with respect, to being listened to, and to having the opportunity to respond thoughtfully" (11). Part of giving respect is knowing that the writer needs, more than anything else, your presence as a sympathetic fellow writer. Telling the writer what she needs to do does not truly help her; instead, listening to the writer talk about her ideas release her from her isolation while also allowing her to reflect upon her own ideas.

Flexibility and Nontraditional Writers

After reading for weeks about the challenges that nontraditional students face, I finally observed the dynamics of such a consultation in action. The student who arrived at the Writing Center was from the School of Continuing Studies. It was clear when the consultation began that she was uncertain about what she would face at her consultation. She continually stressed that the work she had brought to the center - citations, paper, outline - was just a draft that needed to be changed. She apologized several times for having forgotten her paper's prompt although from her explanation, it was a straightforward assignment: an argumentative paper that needed support and citations. She was so concerned that her consultant see the exact prompt that she asked to access it on Blackboard to show him.

Even just from the first ten minutes of the consultation, a main theme of the hour emerged: flexibility. Watching the interaction between the consultant and the student, it struck me about that minor issues that may seem fixable to a traditionally-aged student can seem insurmountable to an older student who is adjusting to being back in the classroom. This student first explained to the consultant that her professor had commented on her lack of transitions in a previous paper. As he read this paper, it was clear that her transitions were fine, and he told her that. However, the student was skeptical. Although he tried to address other aspects of the paper, it was evident that her first concern was her transitions. After reading the topic sentences of each paragraph aloud, we realized that to this student, transitions meant transitional phrases. When she did not have these, she assumed that she did not have good transitions.

When the consultant recognized this, he commented that her natural writing style linked the ideas between paragraphs in a way that was effective and clear. The way she had organized her paper made her ideas link and flow gradually throughout the paper, building on each other without the need for superfluous transitional words. In this way, the consultant acted as an interpreter of the professor's comments and gave her much needed praise. The student was so distracted by what she thought was problematic that she was unable to concentrate on anything else on her paper. After the consultant was able to show her that this obstacle was easily overcome, she was able to see other aspects of her paper as fixable.

Similarly, the SCS student was much more concerned about following specific rules. When we read Hjortshoj earlier in the semester, we discussed how not every grammatical rule was set in stone. This student, not confident in her writing ability, was afraid to stray from the conventional rules of grammar: not ending a sentence in a preposition, starting a sentence with "because", etc. She feared taking academic risks, and doing things that were, in her words, "not academically appropriate." I believe this is a challenge for many SCS students. Because they are less comfortable in an academic setting, they are also less comfortable with the flexibility of the English language.

As writing consultants, we should be guides in helping students see possibilities in their writing. With nontraditional students, this task is even more crucial. By helping these students see that writing does not have to be a set of formal rules and convention, we allow them more freedom to expand their writing, and their ability as writers.

"Cultural and Linguistic Backgrounds": Insightful or Stereotypical?

The more I encounter ESL students, the more I admire them. Most Americans I know do not know enough of a foreign language to get around on vacation, let alone write a complex academic work. As I prepare to go abroad to West Africa in the fall, I envision myself in the shoes of the international students I encounter at Richmond, struggling to live and to learn in an environment that uses a language that is not native to me. It is the combination of both social and linguistic barriers that challenges both writing consultants and the students they intend to help. In Bouchra Moujtahid's essay, "Influence of cultural and linguistic backgrounds on the writing of Arabic and Japanese students of English," it becomes clear that writing consultants must take into consideration not only the linguistic limitations or strengths of an ESL student, but also their cultural context in order to best help them succeed.

The prospect of tutoring ESL students for a training writing consultant is a daunting one. While learning about the specific cultural influences that explain behavioral or linguistic patterns is helpful, it also indicates to me how complex these types of consultations can be, and how little I actually know. While I was familiar with the idea that Japanese students may be overly polite or less likely to verbalize problems they are having, some aspects of Arab culture were very surprising to me. For example, Moujtahid explains that Arab writing tends to make large, often unrealistic claims. While an English speaker may assume that they are boasting or making unsubstantiated claims, Moujtahid writes that "Arabs understand that such exaggerated statements are not intended to report on the state of reality, but rather to represent what the Arabs intend or hope to do, what they believe they are capable of doing" (3). Thus, the overstated or embellished sounding claim that an American consultant finds ridiculous may sound completely logical to an Arab student. Similarly, the repetition that Arab students use to indicate sincerity and emphasis, may seem overly redundant to an English speaker. Although these problems in the writing of an American student may indicate a lack of academic integrity or even laziness, in the essay of an Arabic speaker, they must be considered in their cultural context.

In contrast, Japanese students are much more restrained in their writing. According to Moujtahid, there is a "deep distrust of language in the Japanese culture, stemming, perhaps, from the Zen Buddhist conviction that language imposes its own organization upon reality and prevents us from seeing what truly is" (4). She goes on to say that "if an emotion is put into words...it is somehow trivialized, insincere" (4). Suddenly, a student's claim that seems ambiguous or unsupported is much more understandable. Before I began this course, I think I would not have realized this. In a rush, I would have just assumed that the student was unable or unwilling to create a logical argument. By understanding that in Japanese culture, intuition and "moments of truth" are valued more highly than the display of the argument's structure, I will better be able to spot problems and address them with sensitivity.

While I do think that Moujtahid exposes cultural aspects of ESL writing that are normally hidden to consultants, I felt that she was at times generalizing and even bordered on being stereotypical. Although I understand that these observations are meant to provide insight in a culture as a whole, the International Studies student in me fears that they will be considered by some readers as a universal rule for all Arab or Japanese students who enter the doors of the Writing Center. While I suppose this could be true of any article written about tutoring a specific sector of students, Moujtahid seemed unapologetic in her generalizations. Even the terms she used to refer to the students in questions made me wince. As she writes that "when trust is established, a Japanese will become quite relaxed and communicative" (5). I dislike the way she refers to "a Japanese" instead of a Japanese student or a Japanese speaker; to me, it sounds archaic and even offensive, as if the individual in question could be completely described by her ethnicity.

Despite these flaws, I believe that Moujtahid's findings are valuable to the peer consultant. They should be used not as a manual about ESL students, but instead as tools that can be used to help signal and solve problems in a consultation. When I find myself looking at a problem through the confines of an American viewpoint, I can remind myself of these cultural barriers. Although the act of tutoring an ESL student can see intimidating, the best way to truly become a better consultant for these students is not to read theories, but to practice.

Tutoring as...failure

Last week, I wrote about my exceptionally good consultation with a friend. After this consultation, I was on a high. After hours studying theory, observing appointments, and practicing my skills, it seemed as if I was actually succeeding on my first fledgling attempts at consulting. But just as I left the nest, wings outstretched with confidence, I fell.

Living in the farmlands of the Midwest, I learned to tell when a storm was coming. I could read it in the odd, greenish quality of the light, the stillness of the air, the sudden silence of even the birds. I wish I had this sense in a consultation. Looking back, there was nothing that indicated catastrophe, nothing that hinted at the possibility of failure. I was reading over a somewhat lengthy paper on cultural mulattos for a friend, T, that she had written the week prior. I knew that T was desperate to do well on this paper, as she had been unhappy with a previous grade in the class. I also knew that she had spent a substancial amount of time reworking the paper already, and she felt tentatively confident in what she had written.

Maybe these factors influenced how I read the paper. Maybe I was so expectant for the paper to be excellent that I saw it as excellent without REALLY concentrating on the merit of the content. In any case, I finished reading the paper with few concerns. My major concern regarded the thesis. After reading the prompt, and seeing comments on an earlier paper of T's, I knew the professor had very high expectations regarding the originality and depth of the argument. While I believed T had proved her point very well, I had a small nagging thought that this point might be too obvious, too surface level. But by saying this, when the student so clearly had given it thought, I was worried that I was overstepping a boundary. T had created this argument, it was HER idea, and if she proved it, who was I to say it was not right for the paper? The student had written 12 seemingly well-crafted pages about it. She believed in her argument, and I felt as if it would be too directive (and utterly frustrating) to tell her that she needed to rethink it.

I skirted around the issue, suggesting that she try to specify her thesis more pointedly. I asked her to try to say exactly what she was writing about in her thesis in order for it to be less general. But even with these changes, a nagging feeling of discomfort remained in the pit of my stomach. Had I done enough? Had I done too much? In "Apprenticed to Failure," Sherwood notes that the most worrisome failure of writing tutors is when students " go away apparently satisfied but leave us with a sort of crawly feeling—a suspicion that we've missed the real problem, neglected to say something that might have made a difference" (52). While I assured T of the strengths of her paper, as it really was very well-written, I wondered internally if it would be enough to get her the result she desired.

One of the benefits of tutoring a friend, or at least someone you have contact with on a regular basis, is that you are present throughout the "life" of the paper, from the idea's inception to its final grade. However, this apparent benefit can quickly transform into a major drawback. The next week, I received a text shortly before class: "got a c. don't know what happened." As I stared blankly at the images of tanks and soliders on the foreign policy Powerpoint before me, I dealt with an internal battle. Despite my attempts at being objective, of denying responsibility and attachment to the paper, I felt deeply guilty. I was four weeks away from finishing my training. I was supposed to be able to see these problems. I should be able to help an excellent student get a decent grade on a paper. Maybe my abilities weren't as strong as I thought they were. Although I knew that it was not my fault, that it was not my paper, I couldn't help but feel like I had completely failed.

I take comfort from a statement that Sherwood makes when writing about tutoring and failure.

We feel anguish when we fail to help students because we invest ourselves in
and care deeply about our work. If the opposite were true, if we did not care and
did not strive for excellence, we would find neither safety nor satisfaction, because
surrendering to our sense of inadequacy would mean failing to realize our potential
and failing to help writers realize theirs. Meanwhile, if we ignore our shortcomings,
we risk perpetuating them. (52)

At some point, I have to accept that I cannot help every writer that I wish to help. Not only must I accept this, but I must be able to separate my sense of worth as a consultant from the individual successes or failures those whom I help. I can only be a good consultant when I am able to acknowledge my weaknesses and remain confident in spite of them.

Tutoring as Empowerment

As a potential writing consultant who has observed very few consultations in the past month, I have attempted to practice through holding informal consultations with friends. S is a biology major who arrived at the writing center with a bedraggled-looking copy of Jane Eyre, a prompt from her first college English class and little confidence in her own ability. Tutoring S was a unique experience for me because I was able to help her through all the stages of her writing. She explained to me that her usual method when beginning a paper was to sit and write down every quote applicable to her prompt. As we continued talking, she also admitted that it could take her a week to write a short paper, because she would be unsatisfied and would start over several times. At this point, I realized that S was so intimidated by what the professor was asking her to do that she was afraid to write what she really thought about the book.

With a bit of coaxing, I encouraged S to free-write for twenty minutes. When we compared what she had written previously, and what she wrote during her prewriting session. While her formal writing had been unengaging and rigid, her prewriting was clear, impassioned and highly insightful. When I pointed out the strengths of her prewriting, S said that she had discovered knowledge of Jane Eyre with her prewriting that she was unable to reconcile with the current argument of her paper. Although I did not see the problem of this, S was clearly torn. She had an argument that she believed "fit" the prompt of her professor, but that she clearly did not find interesting. As we discussed this, she admitted to me that she was most discouraged by her paper because she could not come up with a complete argument. While some aspects of her paper supported the fact that Jane Eyre was a passive object, others did not. She spoke so articulately about the inconsistencies and their purpose that I got a much clearer sense of her knowledge than what was contained in her first draft.

"You know," I told her tentatively, "sometimes, you can't make a conclusion that is free from all weaknesses. Sometimes the best thing to do is to acknowledge that you recognize them." From her expression, it was clear that she had not expected this answer. However, by allowing her the freedom to really think critically about her argument without pretending to be unaware of potential contradictions, I think she felt more confident in what she was doing. By discussing the plot and the characters in depth, S and I were able to focus on the text itself, and not on creating the foolproof argument she assumed her professor wanted. She evidently became more excited about what she was writing about, and when she believed in what she was saying, she took ownership of the paper. I simply was a sounding-board for her ideas.

Although I was happy for the fact she later got an A and was referred to study as a writing consultant herself, in the end, it was most rewarding to see her renewed interest in the subject and in writing. The informal session, she said, was "fun," and later added that we should "talk about things like that more often." I, as a representative of peer tutoring, had formalized a discussion about Jane Eyre. Tutoring was not simply sitting down at a desk and making judgments of her work, but helping her to access her own knowledge in a way that she found empowering. To me, this is clear proof of the Writing Center promoting a culture of academic seriousness and engagement.